[R-G] Schlomo Sand on the Zionist Nationalist Myth of Enforced exile

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://mondediplo.com/2008/09/07israel>
Zionist nationalist myth of enforced exile
Israel deliberately forgets its history

An Israeli historian suggests the diaspora was the consequence, not of
the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising
across north Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East

By Schlomo Sand

Every Israeli knows that he or she is the direct and exclusive
descendant of a Jewish people which has existed since it received the
Torah (1) in Sinai. According to this myth, the Jews escaped from
Egypt and settled in the Promised Land, where they built the glorious
kingdom of David and Solomon, which subsequently split into the
kingdoms of Judah and Israel. They experienced two exiles: after the
destruction of the first temple, in the 6th century BC, and of the
second temple, in 70 AD.

Two thousand years of wandering brought the Jews to Yemen, Morocco,
Spain, Germany, Poland and deep into Russia. But, the story goes, they
always managed to preserve blood links between their scattered
communities. Their uniqueness was never compromised.

At the end of the 19th century conditions began to favour their return
to their ancient homeland. If it had not been for the Nazi genocide,
millions of Jews would have fulfilled the dream of 20 centuries and
repopulated Eretz Israel, the biblical land of Israel. Palestine, a
virgin land, had been waiting for its original inhabitants to return
and awaken it. It belonged to the Jews, rather than to an Arab
minority that had no history and had arrived there by chance. The wars
in which the wandering people reconquered their land were just; the
violent opposition of the local population was criminal.

This interpretation of Jewish history was developed as talented,
imaginative historians built on surviving fragments of Jewish and
Christian religious memory to construct a continuous genealogy for the
Jewish people. Judaism's abundant historiography encompasses many
different approaches.

But none have ever questioned the basic concepts developed in the late
19th and early 20th centuries. Discoveries that might threaten this
picture of a linear past were marginalised. The national imperative
rejected any contradiction of or deviation from the dominant story.
University departments exclusively devoted to "the history of the
Jewish people", as distinct from those teaching what is known in
Israel as general history, made a significant contribution to this
selective vision. The debate on what constitutes Jewishness has
obvious legal implications, but historians ignored it: as far as they
are concerned, any descendant of the people forced into exile 2,000
years ago is a Jew.

Nor did these official investigators of the past join the controversy
provoked by the "new historians" from the late 1980s. Most of the
limited number of participants in this public debate were from other
disciplines or non-academic circles: sociologists, orientalists,
linguists, geographers, political scientists, literary academics and
archaeologists developed new perspectives on the Jewish and Zionist
past. Departments of Jewish history remained defensive and
conservative, basing themselves on received ideas. While there have
been few significant developments in national history over the past 60
years (a situation unlikely to change in the short term), the facts
that have emerged face any honest historian with fundamental
questions.
Founding myths shaken

Is the Bible a historical text? Writing during the early half of the
19th century, the first modern Jewish historians, such as Isaak Markus
Jost (1793-1860) and Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), did not think so. They
regarded the Old Testament as a theological work reflecting the
beliefs of Jewish religious communities after the destruction of the
first temple. It was not until the second half of the century that
Heinrich Graetz (1817-91) and others developed a "national" vision of
the Bible and transformed Abraham's journey to Canaan, the flight from
Egypt and the united kingdom of David and Solomon into an authentic
national past. By constant repetition, Zionist historians have
subsequently turned these Biblical "truths" into the basis of national
education.

But during the 1980s an earthquake shook these founding myths. The
discoveries made by the "new archaeology" discredited a great exodus
in the 13th century BC. Moses could not have led the Hebrews out of
Egypt into the Promised Land, for the good reason that the latter was
Egyptian territory at the time. And there is no trace of either a
slave revolt against the pharaonic empire or of a sudden conquest of
Canaan by outsiders.

Nor is there any trace or memory of the magnificent kingdom of David
and Solomon. Recent discoveries point to the existence, at the time,
of two small kingdoms: Israel, the more powerful, and Judah, the
future Judea. The general population of Judah did not go into 6th
century BC exile: only its political and intellectual elite were
forced to settle in Babylon. This decisive encounter with Persian
religion gave birth to Jewish monotheism.

Then there is the question of the exile of 70 AD. There has been no
real research into this turning point in Jewish history, the cause of
the diaspora. And for a simple reason: the Romans never exiled any
nation from anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean.
Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of Judea continued to
live on their lands, even after the destruction of the second temple.
Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century, while the majority
embraced Islam during the 7th century Arab conquest.

Most Zionist thinkers were aware of this: Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later
president of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister,
accepted it as late as 1929, the year of the great Palestinian revolt.
Both stated on several occasions that the peasants of Palestine were
the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea (2).
Proselytising zeal

But if there was no exile after 70 AD, where did all the Jews who have
populated the Mediterranean since antiquity come from? The smokescreen
of national historiography hides an astonishing reality. From the
Maccabean revolt of the mid-2nd century BC to the Bar Kokhba revolt of
the 2nd century AD, Judaism was the most actively proselytising
religion. The Judeo-Hellenic Hasmoneans forcibly converted the
Idumeans of southern Judea and the Itureans of Galilee and
incorporated them into the people of Israel. Judaism spread across the
Middle East and round the Mediterranean. The 1st century AD saw the
emergence in modern Kurdistan of the Jewish kingdom of Adiabene, just
one of many that converted.

The writings of Flavius Josephus are not the only evidence of the
proselytising zeal of the Jews. Horace, Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus
were among the Roman writers who feared it. The Mishnah and the Talmud
(3) authorised conversion, even if the wise men of the Talmudic
tradition expressed reservations in the face of the mounting pressure
from Christianity.

Although the early 4th century triumph of Christianity did not mark
the end of Jewish expansion, it relegated Jewish proselytism to the
margins of the Christian cultural world. During the 5th century, in
modern Yemen, a vigorous Jewish kingdom emerged in Himyar, whose
descendants preserved their faith through the Islamic conquest and
down to the present day. Arab chronicles tell of the existence, during
the 7th century, of Judaised Berber tribes; and at the end of the
century the legendary Jewish queen Dihya contested the Arab advance
into northwest Africa. Jewish Berbers participated in the conquest of
the Iberian peninsula and helped establish the unique symbiosis
between Jews and Muslims that characterised Hispano-Arabic culture.

The most significant mass conversion occurred in the 8th century, in
the massive Khazar kingdom between the Black and Caspian seas. The
expansion of Judaism from the Caucasus into modern Ukraine created a
multiplicity of communities, many of which retreated from the 13th
century Mongol invasions into eastern Europe. There, with Jews from
the Slavic lands to the south and from what is now modern Germany,
they formed the basis of Yiddish culture (4).
Prism of Zionism

Until about 1960 the complex origins of the Jewish people were more or
less reluctantly acknowledged by Zionist historiography. But
thereafter they were marginalised and finally erased from Israeli
public memory. The Israeli forces who seized Jerusalem in 1967
believed themselves to be the direct descendents of the mythic kingdom
of David rather than – God forbid – of Berber warriors or Khazar
horsemen. The Jews claimed to constitute a specific ethnic group that
had returned to Jerusalem, its capital, from 2,000 years of exile and
wandering.

This monolithic, linear edifice is supposed to be supported by biology
as well as history. Since the 1970s supposedly scientific research,
carried out in Israel, has desperately striven to demonstrate that
Jews throughout the world are closely genetically related.

Research into the origins of populations now constitutes a legitimate
and popular field in molecular biology and the male Y chromosome has
been accorded honoured status in the frenzied search for the unique
origin of the "chosen people". The problem is that this historical
fantasy has come to underpin the politics of identity of the state 
of
Israel. By validating an essentialist, 
ethnocentric definition of
Judaism it encourages a segregation that separates Jews from non-Jews
– whether Arabs, Russian immigrants or foreign workers.

Sixty years after its foundation, Israel refuses to accept that it
should exist for the sake of its citizens. For almost a quarter of the
population, who are not regarded as Jews, this is not their state
legally. At the same time, Israel presents itself as the homeland of
Jews throughout the world, even if these are no longer persecuted
refugees, but the full and equal citizens of other countries.

A global ethnocracy invokes the myth of the eternal nation,
reconstituted on the land of its ancestors, to justify internal
discrimination against its own citizens. It will remain difficult to
imagine a new Jewish history while the prism of Zionism continues to
fragment everything into an ethnocentric spectrum. But Jews worldwide
have always tended to form religious communities, usually by
conversion; they cannot be said to share an ethnicity derived from a
unique origin and displaced over 20 centuries of wandering.

The development of historiography and the evolution of modernity were
consequences of the invention of the nation state, which preoccupied
millions during the 19th and 20th centuries. The new millennium has
seen these dreams begin to shatter.

And more and more academics are analysing, dissecting and
deconstructing the great national stories, especially the myths of
common origin so dear to chroniclers of the past.

Translated by Donald Hounam

(1) The Torah, from the Hebrew root yara (to teach) is the founding
text of Judaism. It consists of the first five books of the Old
Testament (the Pentateuch): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and
Deuteronomy.

(2) See David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Eretz Israel in the past
and present, 1918 (in Yiddish), and Jerusalem, 1980 (in Hebrew);
Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Our population in the country, Executive Committee of
the Union for Youth and the Jewish National Fund, Warsaw, 1929 (in
Hebrew).

(3) The Mishnah, regarded as the first work of rabbinic literature,
was drawn up around 200 AD. The Talmud is a synthesis of rabbinic
discussions on the law, customs and history of the Jews. The
Palestinian Talmud was written between the 3rd and 5th centuries; the
Babylonian Talmud was compiled at the end of the 5th century.

(4) Yiddish, spoken by the Jews of eastern Europe, was a
Germano-Slavic language incorporating Hebrew words.

Shlomo Sand is professor of history at Tel Aviv university and the
author of Comment le people juif fut inventé (Fayard, Paris, 2008).

<http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2008/08/SAND/16205>
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